Variation and change in reference to discourse participants in Catalan parliamentary debate (1932–1938 and 1980–2020)

This chapter summarises the results of an ongoing study on the discourse strategies used by speakers to refer to the participants in political debates in the Parliament of Catalonia during two time periods: the period spanning 1932 and 1938, under the Spanish Second Republic, and from 1980, the year of the recovery of Catalonia’s democratic institutions, until 2020. The study’s theoretical background is the seminal work on deixis and politeness carried out by Levinson (1983) and followed by others, together with the foundational studies on participation frameworks by Goffman (1981), and the research into these subjects with reference to Catalan and other languages. Data from a corpus including the transcriptions of debates taken from the Diari de Sessions of the Parliament of Catalonia (more than 600,000 words) are classified and analysed.

Applying statistical reliability tests, the analysis combines qualitative and quantitative methods and highlights several trends in the use of different forms and strategies. The incorporation of Goffman’s (1981) participation frameworks provides data that give a much more accurate answer to the questions set out than the analysis of just person deictic forms and honorifics. This is true not only of the study of parliamentary debates, but also of any other speech event involving more than two participants.